Serval, a two-year-old startup building AI agents for corporate IT departments, has raised $150 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the company at $3 billion. That's three times what investors valued it at in December.
The financing brings Serval's total funding to $277 million and puts it in direct competition with ServiceNow, one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world. Rather than adding another chatbot to existing IT systems, Serval wants companies to replace those systems entirely.
The pitch is straightforward. A new employee needs access to Salesforce, an engineer requests additional permissions, or someone in finance needs an expense approved. These requests typically pass through service desks, approval chains and several software applications. Serval's agents are designed to complete the work across those systems, with human approval retained for sensitive actions.
The company has already persuaded some recognizable customers to make the switch. Electric vehicle maker Lucid Motors migrated from ServiceNow to Serval in 45 days, according to CEO Jake Stauch. Other customers include Ramp, Notion, Perplexity and SeatGeek.
At SeatGeek, employees have built more than 130 automated workflows using Serval, including a process for granting access to Anthropic's Claude. The platform has also expanded beyond IT into HR, finance, legal and security.
Serval's underlying product, Catalyst, allows enterprise teams to build automation by describing what they want in natural language. The software generates workflows that can interact with existing applications. Administrators control which actions agents can execute and which require approval.
There is a catch, however. Replacing a legacy system doesn't eliminate the complexity of enterprise operations. Each customer has different applications, permissions, internal policies and exceptions. Making an agent function reliably across those differences is significantly harder than demonstrating one successful automation.
Serval is addressing that problem partly through people. It is launching ProServal, a professional services operation that plans to place 100 automation engineers inside customer organizations to identify and implement workflows.
The company has grown from approximately 20 employees to nearly 200 in a year, and the new capital will support further expansion.
The larger question is whether Serval can turn that early momentum into a scalable software business. ServiceNow and other incumbents have years of integrations, enterprise relationships and compliance infrastructure behind them.
But Serval has already demonstrated that some companies are willing to replace established systems rather than wait for those vendors to reinvent their products. That is the same bet behind AuxoAI's forward-deployed model, which sells teams alongside software.
For Sequoia, the bet is that enterprise automation will increasingly belong to software built around agents from the beginning.